Basically you just rattled off everything I, as someone who never worked in that industry, assumed was going on.

There's just a shit ton of money to be made pretending it's 1955. I went into the wrong business.

just out of curiosity, what are some specific advertising techniques that work consistently?

No specific tactic works forever. There is no "1 weird trick." You need to set up your advertising and sales funnels to track as prospects become customers, and continually experiment on the message and the channels. This is where most startups start and a lot of them get it wrong. If you have boatloads of VC money, you can run a lot of bad experiments until you hopefully hit paydirt. Paydirt is +ROI ad campaigns on a large targeted demographic. Then you treat this audience like a goldmine. At first it's easy to mine and pick up gold nuggets in river beds. As the easy pickings disappear, you'll find yourself investing in increasingly more expensive machinery and infrastructure to continue mining operations. As you've extracted most the gold, look for byproduct like copper, silver, etc (in startup terms, introduce ancillary products and services). As you hit one gold mine, keep prospecting other areas (distribution channels like display ads, native ads, social media, etc).

If you end up a multi billion dollar unicorn with tens of millions in ad budget, targeted direct ads no longer move the needle like they did when you were a startup. Now for the Director of Marketing to justify increasingly larger compensation, he needs to increase his ad spend and starts whispering about spending money on ads that have no direct correlation to the bottom line. This is called brand advertising. Hint: If an early stage startup spends more budget on brand advertising than direct marketing, run.

Effective advertising is matching the product/service with some problem, on a specific channel of eyeballs, with a specific message. There are tons of new channels popping up every few years (think google, facebook, instagram, youtube, twitch, pinterest, wechat, stackexchange, hn, reddit, etc). There are millions of permutations but you have a finite ad budget. The magic is deciding how to show what to who.

For the "how" and the "what", in the future, I bet ads platforms will ask you to write an long essay about what you sell, and they will automatically generate many different ads with GPT-2 (probably in real-time, to mix some content of whatever the viewer is browsing at the same time), and everything will be automatically A/B tested, segmented, adjusted, etc with reinforcement learning.

Even better, no need to write an essay about your services or products, Google already know everything about it by scraping your website, so just point to the URL, and done

So, there are no techniques that work consistently.

Correct, because everything is dynamic, including the search terms, eyeballs, and competition for keywords. It's pretty simple economics - once I find a way to spend $50 to make $100, it's only a matter of time before other people discover something close enough to make me spend $75 to earn $100. Then $90. Then (conjecture), winners curse takes account and people are spending $110 to make $100 (once Neil Patel's audience hears about it).

With the tactics being gobbled up by the Red Queen effect, you have to move to strategies to win. The OP writes about a pretty good one.

So... using voluum?

Brand awareness ads. Pretty much it’s irrelevant what you say about brand ‘X’ as long as you bombard gullible observer with ‘X’. Then buying ‘X’ would be more familiar choice for millions than buying ‘Y’ or ‘Z’.

I'm not saying you are wrong but brand awareness ads are, if I'm reading correctly, exactly the kind of wasted ad money the parent was talking about. They are the cluster bombs of the advertising world.

I think the Parent was actually advocating surgical PPC management of the style patio11 has written about extensively.

Branding is a moat. There's a reason Coke and Pepsi spend hundreds of millions on branding ads and I am sure they know there is a ROI there.

Brand campaigns are good if you use vast multichannel campaign to make people remember your product. I dont need to say it is extremely expensive but works.

Other reason to use it is when you dont want to be screwed by fake clicks, and are 100% sure people will find your product anyways and buy it.

And that was half of this post, the blog was as much about using their new product to track this problem as it was about finding the problem. Kudo's to solving a problem you find while making the product.

Yeah, it's funny to see a bunch of people complaining about both ads being ineffective AND conversion tracking being pervasive. But the reality is that unless there's perfect conversion tracking, garbage ads will be inevitable. This is why I have a (very unpopular) opinion of putting precise conversion tracking into the web standard (No, not the garbage one that Apple recently proposed).

Are they impulse buyers, or highly specialized? From time to time I see a cool thing that seems targeted to me, do click it, see the outrageous price, then do research and find the best price/quality ratio on Amazon. I assumed most people did the same really. An example from years back: I thought the Little Giant ladder was an awesome idea, but ridiculously priced. I bought a gorilla knockoff type ladder instead.

I'm not sure, but my girlfriend clicks on ads on instagram and buys things directly from there on a regular basis. I think the people who go on HN might be in a little bit of a bubble about the efficacy of advertisements.

HN is a bubble.

I've been running PPC ads for highly targeted keywords for the last 5 years which have generated a ridiculous return. In general ppc is steady and reliable once you have you're keywords and ads running for a while and are well optimized.

On the other hand, I've recently been trying dropshipping, advertising the product on Facebook.

I did a small test for a unique product, I sourced it from China for around 5 usd and sold them for 25 usd.

People actually bought them on site even though Amazon has them at a much lower price.

Facebook literally knows people who are high spenders / frequent purchasers and will put your ads in front of them. It's actually stupidly powerful.

Why haven’t you scaled out the dropshipping concept further? It sounds pretty solid.

I'm not in the industry so please forgive my ignorance, but what is ad tracing? Is it the same as ad tracking, if it is then I really don't understand as there seems to be a huge amount of tracking going on!